I am trying my hand at cloning Guiness for the first time and have a couple of questions. The first would be what does the addition of flaked barley do for the beer? The second would be acid barley or malt (don't have the book in front of me right now), just what the heck is that stuff...sounds kind of trippy to me The last question would be that it calls for like 4 lbs of either pale or plain malt extract. Either way it sounds like it would be a little thin to me for Guiness, is the addition of specialty grains really going to make up the difference. Why not start out with a dark extract, still using the specialty grains of course. Ok well i had more than just a couple of questions, i'm just trying to get better understanding of the ingredients that I am using. I won't stand for just using this and that because the recipe calls for it. Thanks for any light that someone can shed on the subject.

Flaked barley I assume is for head retention, and mouthfeel.
Acid Barley for that sour taste only guiness has(I have heard it is from a portion of soured stout added to each fresh batch, like you would do with sour dough bread)
The pale or light extract, is because they are standards for brewing. Specialty grains are by the very name special. do you know what your dark extrtact is made from? Also, have you ever heard too much of a good thing. If I were you, I would make the recipe first, and then see if you need to change anything to suit your individual tastes.

I have brewed a batch of 'dry' stout to match the Guiness style and used the flaked barley to add dextrins to the mash. I though about using acid malt to get the sour profile (I haven't tried this yet).

In 'all mash' brewing pale malt is used as base malt. Base malt provides the 'sugars' and the enzymes for the starch conversion. This gives the brewer some control of the brew produced (I will explain). If you use only extract the maltster is in control of the batch profile. As Fitz asked "How do you know?". As a brewer (semi-pro) I want to have some idea and control when the brew will yield between 14 to 18 barrels in the fermenter. We generally use 50 lbs. of base malt per barrel. If you used only dark specialty malts you would not be able to extract the amount of 'sugar' or a sufficient quantity of active enzymes to convert it, hence ,base malt (extract quantity = starting gravity).

Guiness is a 'light' ale (stout). Think of a Half & Half (Black & Tan). Which one floats on top? This may be streching the point but Guiness (and most dry stouts) are 'thin'. Guiness is a strange animal. Draft Guniess is contract brewed all over the world and nitrogen despensed and bottled Guiness imported to the US is brewed by Molson in Canada (I haven't seen real Guiness in years). They went the way of big money and name recognition.

Back to your clone.

Dry stout (starting) SG 1.035-1.050
(finishing) SG 1.010-1.012

I won't get into the amount of alcohol now (that is a very misunderstood subject). But here is the main idea.

So the trick is to determine what you want as a final product and work toward balancing the variables. I would go to all mash brewing, but if you can't try steeping your flaked barley and specialty grains between 158 - 164 deg. F. This should help add to the mouthfeel and head retention. Let me know if you decide to use the acid malt.

I am working my way up to all grain brewing but haven't quite made that leap yet. I do intend on using the acid malt, so hopefully i will come out with something reasonablly similar to Guiness. Just so you know the recipe that i am going by is out of a book that i just bought, "Clone Brew by Mark & Tess Szamatulski" I am going the extract route and have already brought all of the extract & specialty grain involved. I would like to start branching out a bit, and i see in the book where they have instructions for a partial mash but i have no idea of how to do this. Would using a partial mash greatly improve the overall quality and taste of the beer? If so if u could give me some tips on this process i would appreciate it. Thanks everyone for all the info provided!

Here is a quick explaination, and a quick version of partial mash.
Why Partial Mash?
What rewards are there in making beer from grain rather than extract? The reason I give most often is simply that there are some flavors due to particular grains or adjuncts that simply are not available in any extract. For example, if you want to make an oatmeal stout, you must mash the flaked oats. The same can be said of rye. If you want to mimic the creaminess of Guinness Stout you need to mash flaked barley. I used to mention munich malt but Marie's munich extract addresses that. Mashing is also interesting and fun; it's an extension of the hobby.
One criticism of homebrewing books is that they make mashing sound more difficult than it actually is. What's missing is a very simple approach. Once you have mashed just once, all of the descriptions in the various books are much easier to follow. So here's a quick-and-dirty partial mash procedure that we've used many times in homebrewing classes to take the mystique out of mashing.

Quick-and-Dirty Partial Mashing

1. Add grains to ~1/2 gallon of water (3/4 for Creamy Stout, Marzen, King Kongs) and raise the temperature to anywhere between 150-158

I know this is probably a dumb question but i'll ask any how. When using crystal malts the starches have already been converted to sugars. When i steep the specialty grains i am simply disolving those sugars into the wort. I usually heat the water to 150 degrees take it off the heat and steep the grians for about 1/2 hour. For a partial mash I am basically doing the same thing except for a bit longer, which is giving the mash enough time to convert a decent percentage of the starches to fermentable sugars. Am I correct in my assumption (here's that word we all love) of how these two process work and are different?

The big difference is in the case of your stout. You'll be mashing the flaked barley that hasn't been converted. this is when a partial mash helps out. If it was only for crystal, the steeping would be fine.

That would explian why one of my brews a couple of batches ago turned out so poorly then. I made an oatmeal stout expecting it to me thick and slightly sweet and creamy, full of body. What i ended up with was thin and watery, of which i wouldn't even really want to compare to a stout. The guy at the brew shop told me just to toss the oats in there when i added my hops! Arghhh can't believe he would steer me wrong like that, I thought he was a veteran. I guess if i would have mashed the oats first i would have ended up with quite different results huh.

Some brewshop owners are only in it for the money. Some try to learn, but are only comfortable with certain style of beer. One of the shops around here, has a guy who doesn't know squat. He even tried to tell me his yeast was an ale and a lager yeast. In the same packet!

Sauermalz or acidulated malt is intended as a means to lower the pH of a mash while maintaining Reinheitsgebot compliance, not as a flavor agent. If used in proportions that would result in flavor contributions, it will come off in the forefront as a very dominantly sour flavor sort of like some of the French and Belgian farmhouse ales and would be VERY puckeringly dry !

Guiness uses an addition of around 20% lactically soured wort in a pre-mix syrup that is added to all of their stouts worlwide (at last count there are 19 versions!). The best (and quite easy) way to simulate this addition is to use malt vinegar which is very similarly produced. Be conservative at first as the vinegar is more concentrated than a soured wort addition would be and then adjust from there based on the target sourness desired.

Mesa Maltworks wrote:Guiness uses an addition of around 20% lactically soured wort in a pre-mix syrup that is added to all of their stouts worlwide (at last count there are 19 versions!). The best (and quite easy) way to simulate this addition is to use malt vinegar which is very similarly produced. Be conservative at first as the vinegar is more concentrated than a soured wort addition would be and then adjust from there based on the target sourness desired.

Eric

I have long thought about trying malt vinegar in my Stout, but do not have a clue how much to add....
Any suggestions for a starting point, in say a 5-gallon batch??
Thanks

From what I've read in Guinness they use 3% Double Strength Pasteurized Guinness that has had Vinegaring bacteria( or whatever) added to it. I'm not sure which book it was but I could find out at the college library I borrowed it from so very long ago.

"May those who love us love us, and those who do not, may God turn their hearts. But if he will not turn their hearts, may he turn their ankles so that we may know them by their limping."- Traditional Irish Blessing

My thoughts are that in a "low tech" operation (at home) it would be a whole lot more predictable and repeatable to use malt vinegar than to let a couple of bottles of beer sour... safer too. I just wonder how much more concentrated the vinegar is. I was thinking of adding about 8 oz to a 5-gal. batch at the end of the boil.
Any thoughts? Too much? not enough?